Reader Comments:

Views expressed in submitted comments are that of the author, and not necessarily shared by Railnews.

• Andrew Gwilt, Basildon Essex

  Or why not let Jeremy Corbyn take over the EC franchise. I think he’ll do a fabulous job.

• Tony Pearce, READING

  I think that a more serious problem is that the period of continuous growth in Passengers is over, and no amount of 'special offers' will get any more.
  [No. Far too soon to know. The number of season ticket holders did indeed drop in Q1 and Q2, but that could be attributed to Southern's problems and London Bridge. The number of other types of tickets bought has continued to rise. We will need at a full year (at least) of 'normal' services before the real nature of the trend becomes apparent. Interestingly, Q1 showed the main fall, and the reduction rate had almost trailed off in Q2 (0.4%). For more, see Hot Topic in the February edition of Railnews, published tomorrow.--Editor.]

• Melvyn Windebank, Canvey Island, Essex

  While it seems Virgin is getting an extension to its WCML franchise !
  
  You couldn't make it up , well unless your Chris Grayling

• cheamcharmer2@gmail.com, surrey

  Yet another example of the privatised railway gravy train hitting the buffers!
  Branson and Souter must be laughing all the way to the bank

• Chris Jones-Bridger, Buckley

  History shows that the East Coast Main Line inter city service developed through a process of incremental infrastructure enhancements combined with the introduction of progressive generations of rolling stock until full electrification was achieved. When the route was privatised it included some of the highest yielding services in the BR Inter City portfolio. Under the franchise model the DfT has been compliant with encouraging successive private operators to sweat the preexisting assets in return for the promise of high premium payments. Perhaps now the point has been reached where this model is shown to be flawed & unsustainable?
  
  Hopefully the report from the latest inquiry will highlight & underline the cost of a fragmented railway where infrastructure investment & operator aspiration have not been aligned? While the DtT & Treasury have been happy to retain the premiums at what cost has this been in terms of running franchise competitions & re letting the business? A cost burden the industry can ill afford to carry & adding no value to the travelling public as well as poor value to the taxpayer.
  
  While operators have come & gone many promised enhancements still remain unfulfilled. GNER, National Express & Virgin/Stagecoach have all promised expansion beyond the core ECML routes .Irrespective of operator the introduction of the IEP fleet should allow a generational change in operation. However will the service enhancement proposed by Virgin/Stagecoach survive the latest hiatus?

• Tony Pearce, READING

  Nice to know that the Taxpayer is Quids in with the private firms running the franchise. However there is no point bankrupting a Firm who seems to have made a Big Mistake. They seem to be £100 Million down already so they are not getting any fat profits. Having been in Business I always worked out what I thought something would really cost and then add on 10% for profit. A job wouldn't be done properly unless there was something in it for Firm. Cut their profit margin too much and they cut corners. Not working out the true cost before they started meant you often were over-charged.

• david c smith, Bletchley

  To me, it seems yet another instance of the slow "coming apart" of the passenger rail franchising model.
  Do we need to apply a uniform "one size fits all"model to the considerable diversity of operations ?
  On a privatised railway, shouldn't we be looking to exploit its inherent strengths, rather than trying to suppress them ?
  Shouldn't accountability be acheived as directly and as close to customers and taxpayers as feasible, rather than via Whitehall / Westminster ?

• Chris Neville-Smith, Durham

  Okay, I've tried doing the number-crunching here and got stuck.
  
  In the final year of East Coast (2014-2015), it paid £267m to the Government. The last available year of VTEC (2016-2017) has a payment of £272m, No surprise there, it's almost the same service (apart from a few Newcastle services being extended to Edinburgh), you'd expect the figure to be about the same.
  
  Multiply £272m over 8 years and you get £2.17 bn, not far off the £2.3bn at 2015 prices. One would think the shortfall would be covered by the increased business once Azumas are introduced.
  
  But - hang on, where does this £3.3 bn allowing for inflation come from? That's a hike for 43% over 8 years. That's way more than you'd expect from inflation alone. Am I missing something here?
  
  (And just to check: we're not mixing up inflation allowance and present value here, are we?)
  
  [The £2.3bn is npv. The formula used by the DfT includes inflation but also other Treasury-approved factors, which get complicated to boil down in a few words. To quote from a typical DfT document: "We used a factor of 1.61 to uprate the price and discount base year from 2002 to 2010, to ensure comparability with analysis in other government departments." Or, to put it another way, net present value is determined by calculating the costs (negative cash flows) and benefits (positive cash flows) for each period of an investment. Simple!--Editor.]